Adding Media to Pages

With RoboHelp, it’s easy to add media to your documentation or help system. Often, by adding media, you can make your help documentation more intuitive and user friendly because it lets you show users how to use your application and/or take the exact steps required to perform a specific task.

For the FlashFAQ site, you will embed SWF files from within the ZIP file you downloaded that asks users to test the code that is demonstrated in some topics so they can try the finished product before building the example themselves. Whether you’re adding a simple SWF file, a RoboDemo movie, or a QuickTime movie, embedding media is quick and simple.

1. Right-click the Using the Alert component topic and choose Edit With > RoboHelp WYSIWYG.
2. After the document opens in the editor, move the cursor to the point where you want to embed the media and select Insert > Multimedia from the main menu to open the Multimedia dialog box.

3. Click the Browse button (to the right of the Multimedia name text field) to launch the Select Multimedia File dialog box. Browse to the Alert.show.swf SWF file from the files you extracted from the ZIP file at the beginning of the tutorial.

   Note: Use the “Multimedia in project folders” area to navigate the existing multimedia files if you want to recycle existing multimedia within your project.

4. Click OK to close the Multimedia dialog box and embed the multimedia on the HTML page.

The Preview pane lets you view the media file within the dialog box before embedding it within your project. You can set how text wrapping is handled with the media file. For example, you might want to allow text to flow around the left or right of the media file, or choose no wrapping.

There is one thing you should notice while embedding video files, such as WMV files: The video controls are not automatically added to the HTML pages. This makes it difficult to pause, stop and replay videos without right clicking the video and selecting a control from the context menu. This is easy to remedy, but requires that you manually edit the HTML source code using an external editor, or switch to the TrueCode tab.

If your embedded media file doesn’t show a controller, click the TrueCode tab in RoboHelp and look for the <embed> and <object> tags in the source code. When you embed either a WMV or MOV file, you can set the controller parameter to true and set the ShowControls parameter to 1. You have to change these values in both the <param> tags and within the <embed> tag, because of dueling browser specifications. After you make these changes, save and regenerate the project files to see the controls for both media types.

Embedding SWF movies in a specific topic for the project works remarkably well. It lets you demonstrate the finalized code in many entries, build a basic feedback form, or even allow people to read and post comments.